


Beneath the Trees

by SilverDagger



Category: Final Fantasy VII
Genre: F/M, Ficlet, In the Sleeping Forest, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-26
Updated: 2016-04-26
Packaged: 2018-06-04 14:30:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 769
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6662551
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SilverDagger/pseuds/SilverDagger
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Planet doesn't deal in forgiveness.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Beneath the Trees

Sephiroth wakes to green overhead, earth underneath, and the crisp clear light of northern climates. The air is sweet and cold, heavy with the scent of growing things, and despite the faint rustle and sway of wind in branches, everything here seems very still. Even the birdsong is muted.

He knows this place. He had passed through here before, with his mother's voice singing in his cells and the City of the Ancients in his sights, but he had known the way then. He's lost now. There are no paths in this forest besides the one leading in, which is nowhere before or behind him, and one direction looks very much like any other. But he cannot stay where he is – alone, unclothed, unarmed – so he walks deeper into the trees, into sunlight and dappled shadow, and doesn't look back even once. His bare feet sink into a carpet of moss and fallen leaves, and with every step, it feels more like he's dreaming.

It's a woman's voice that wakes him.

"The Planet doesn't deal in forgiveness," she says. Just that, and not loudly, but though she's nowhere in sight, he hears her through the hush of the forest, a direction to follow where there had been none before.

 _Mother,_ he thinks, before he can think anything else, but she isn't. No, this is another woman he knows, though her words have something of the same resonance about them, tightly-entangled corruption and renewal. His enemy once, by her own design. He's not sure what she is now, aside from not so defeated as he had thought, but he walks with new purpose until the trees open out and she's there, sitting on a rock in a clearing with her knees pulled up to her chin.

She's wearing the dress she died in. It's stained a dull red-brown over her stomach, but the skin he sees through the fraying hole in the fabric where his sword had pierced her is clean and unbroken. Her hair is loose about her shoulders, and her eyes, when she lifts her bowed head to look in his direction, are the same as his.

"You know that, right?" she says. "A forest fire scorches the ground, and new seeds grow. Medicine can kill, and calamity can heal. What room is there for forgiveness in that?" She tilts her head and speaks as though he doesn't know it, as though he is only a lost creature and not a forest fire himself, and in this place – in this place she isn't wrong. 

She hops down from her rock and walks toward him, and she's not graceful or ethereal or soft. She moves like any Slum girl, heavy boots on her feet and just a hint of what Zack (and who is _Zack?_ ) would have called don't-fuck-with-me swagger. She throws him a fleeting grin, like she's sharing a joke meant for only the two of them, and when she's close enough to stand looking up at him he can see that she's got crooked teeth and a scattering of acne scars across her cheeks – no perfect specimen like him, no puppet. If not for the blood on her dress and the strange way the light falls around her, she could almost be alive. But she isn't, and when she holds out her hand to him, he understands the offer and the price.

Even so, he takes her hand and lets her draw him down, her other hand in his hair and her mouth closing on his. She's solid and warm, the cheap fabric of her dress scratchy and soap-scented against his skin, and she breathes his breath and holds him close and still beneath the shadows of the trees. Lassitude washed over him at her touch, the forest's spell or a lifetime's worth of sleep debt coming due at once, and he sinks to his knees on the mossy ground, amid old bones and the smell of loam where countless travelers had settled in to sleep. She bends low above him as she lays him down, her long hair falling about her face, and she whispers, "I am not the Planet."

He feels the brush of her lips on his brow, ghost-light, and her hand resting on his chest, above his heart.

And then she's gone, and he's alone – as he never has been before, in body and in mind – with nothing but the sigh of wind and the pale light, and the ache of memory already fading.

 _Sleep,_ the wind whispers. _Be at peace._

Sephiroth closes his eyes for the last time, and does not dream.


End file.
